46 ms·

There are other things that can cause E skip to stop working (solar activity is the big one) so while it is good to say "hey propagation just changed, what's up

There are other things that can cause E skip to stop working (solar activity is the big one) so while it is good to say "hey propagation just changed, what's up?" it isn't reasonable to say "Earthquake inbound!" That said, there is interesting work in geology to more accurately characterize this mechanism. The last paper I saw was reference in Science News indicated that pressure on granite (which has a peizo-electric effect) might be the underlying mechanism. I haven't seen any follow up on that hypothesis though (proving or disproving). It would seem pretty straight forward for the seismograph sensor makers to add an E field strength meter to observe this effect if it occurs.

dmix 7y ago
The creator of FiveThiryEight, Nate Silver [1], had a great chapter in his probability book about the global efforts to detect earthquakes and there have been tons of research over the last century (including radio). With many people claiming to have found solutions only for them to quickly fail. With current best-effort science it’s basically impossible to detect them ahead of time, particularly with any relevant geographic accuracy. At most only a probability figures within a 10-100yr+ range over a very broad area seems to be the best they can do. Fault lines can encompass hundreds of towns and cities. Even if they detected the Cali quake before hand from Vancouver there is no way they could pin point that in any reasonable way to evacuate particular towns AFAIK. 1: https://books.google.ca/books?id=SI-VqAT4_hYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q=earthquake&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=SI-VqAT4_hYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1...